The Generalitat has fined the company Ferrovial for deficiencies in the 112 emergency telephone service. The Madrid group, which in 2020 won the award of the service, has breached the quality standards in the language translation service, which in on numerous occasions it has suffered delays and problems in operations.
According to a document from the Department of the Interior, to which Rac1 and La Vanguardia have had access, Ferrovial has been fined a total of 14 times between February 2022 and March 2023. The amounts of the fines range from 847 to 18,000 euros. . The approximate total amount is 67,500 euros.
Xavier González, a member of the works council, confirms to this newspaper the mismanagement of the service in recent years. "The workers cannot assume all the volume of work that an essential service such as 112 requires. We need knowledge in English, French and German and the company does not make any effort to provide training or hire staff with languages," laments González.
According to this representative, the company should hire at least 50 more people to cope with the avalanche of phone calls they receive. Currently, a total of 250 people manage this service, divided equally between the Barcelona and Reus offices. "Every year, the number of calls increases and the company refuses to increase the workforce to attend them with guarantees. The workers suffer a lot of pressure and some even leave the company because they can't keep up," says González.
Every day, the 112 phone receives some 10,000 calls, which increase to 12,000 during the summer, according to the committee's calculations. Due to the lack of structure, a total of 50 calls a day go unanswered. "We are studying taking legal action to improve our working conditions," says González, who recalls that last year the workforce achieved salary increases after seven months of strike.
The emergency telephone service was privatized in 2011 and since then it has been managed by different companies. Regarding the most controversial language issue, the winning company assumes the responsibility of providing services in Catalan, Spanish, English, French and German while subcontracting the rest of the languages to a translation company.
Due to these deficiencies, the workers are in talks with the public company CAT112 -which subcontracts the telephone service to private companies- to prepare a report on the feasibility of internalizing the workers within its structure, thus recovering the public management of the service. The template is waiting to receive a response.
